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Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

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Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#141

Post by dheera »

hyperknot wrote: post #137
dheera wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest I don't see the problem with making commercial use non-free. (a) They're making millions, you deserve a cut of that. (b) If making money makes you more likely to be around in 10 years, that's attractive to businesses. Nobody knows when your donations might suddenly dry up.

The thing is that hosting this really isn't that expensive. My first GitHub Sponsors goal is to reach $175 per month, which would cover the hosting on Hetzner. Of course this cost can grow if the project gets more popular, but it's a good start! I honestly believe this project can cover $175 per month eventually. Of course there is the countless hours which went and which can possibly go into this, but to cover the h…

I mean, sure, but

Let's say 1 year from now your day job gets toxic and you have to work 18 hours a day just to pay your rent and expenses. Are you still going to maintain this?

What if the economy goes to shit and you have trouble scraping that $175/month? How long are you going to pay $175/month for something that isn't making money?

What if, instead, this became a part-time job of yours?

If I was a commercial user of your product, some assurance that your random personal situations aren't going to affect the product stability for a long time would be a good thing.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#142

Post by hyperknot »

RagnarD wrote: post #125

If it does a good job, somebody should get paid for it. I wouldn't rely on using this if it depends on donations (I call this begware). People expect to pay for services and products.

My main project is MapHub, it gives me my income. It's not an income like you'd get in a FAANG job, but still, I'm running it for making a living.

For MapHub to work, I had to invest in my own tile server infrastructure: there is no way I could have made MapHub financially profitable with a 3rd party tile provider. So I kept iterating and iterating on the tile server infrastructure and after 9 years I arrived at a state which was worth open-sourcing.

I'm happy if this project gets to the point from sponsorship where my hosting bill is covered ($175 per month), but it doesn't have to be financially successful on its own.

I'll keep working on it because it's part of my main business, not because I beg for donations.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#143

Post by hyperknot »

btbuildem wrote: post #129

Very cool, love the various tile sets (especially the 3d layer!) One thing that tripped me up is the zoom -- the affordance for zoom in/out across most other mapping UIs is via mouse motions -- how come in your demo it's restricted to the +/- buttons? Perhaps I missed something... Thanks for sharing this, looks very neat.

On the main page I disabled scroll zoom, because it hijacks your scroll and literally you cannot scroll through the map. It makes sense for full-screen maps only.

Of course, you have 100% control over exactly what controls you configure with MapLibre, when you set up your app.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#144

Post by baggachipz »

hyperknot wrote: post #86
baggachipz wrote: post #68

I currently use the cyclosm[1] as a tile map for my small web app. I'd love to use OpenFreeMap instead, as cyclosm is quite slow. Is there any way I can do this for bicycle maps? Awesome project. [1] https://www.cyclosm.org

What you need is a bike specific style for OpenMapTiles schema. Maybe you can find it on GitHub. Once you have the style, you can use Maputnik to tune it to your liking like on this link: https://maputnik.github.io/editor/#0.84/0/0

I found this[2] but I wouldn't know the first thing about how to integrate it, stand it up, serve it, and consume it with leaflet. I'll admit, the world of OSM is quite a labyrinth.

[2] https://github.com/cyclemap/openmaptiles-cycle

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#145

Post by sphars »

kisamoto wrote: post #75
sphars wrote: post #9

Always on the lookout for self-hosted map servers, so I'll definitely try this one out. Slightly off-topic, one thing I'm having a hard time finding is satellite imagery. I need to self-host an offline web application using CesiumJS, and while I can spin up a map server, I can't find satellite imagery for free or cheap. I've used MapTiler[0], their server works great and they offer low-res satellite imagery for free/…

Currently researching this myself? Have you explored the satellite images from ESA/NASA? They are painful to discover but they're available to download for free and fairly (3-6 months) up to date.

I have, though admittedly not deeply enough. Agreed about the discoverability though, I never could quite find what I'm looking for (and perhaps I don't know exactly what I'm looking for)

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#146

Post by Hypnosis6173 »

curzondax wrote: post #100

Alternative: https://versatiles.org/

Just saw a german Talk about this yesterday.

Versatiles provides a free and open to use Server under tiles.versatiles.org which is sponsored by People around the CCC.

Versatiles is also the First to offer a free to use vector card server, which is also amazing.

(For the German Readers: https://media.ccc.de/v/ds24-406-versatiles-freie-karten-fr-a...)

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#147

Post by jaakl »

fegu wrote: post #136
hyperknot wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly, it's to save space. For example there is one such tile for "ocean", which covers 70% of earth. In total, there are 271 million hard links. So out of 300 million files 271 are hard links! The file system limit is 64k hard-links for the same file, so I have to handle the case when it's reached and then start a new file for the next 64k.

Just out of curiosity, is there no clever way to solve this within nginx with rules instead?

In nutiteq mobile maps SDK (later Carto, now abandonware) we used specifically compressed bitmap to represent 'water' and 'empty land' tilemasks to cover these two special cases. We provided planet-scale mobile embedded mbtiles package in 30GB if I remember well. This tile mask (quite instant bitmap index) concept should work well for server case also.

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#148

Post by vinibrito »

About displaying the vector tiles, which project goes well with it? I like Leaflet and worked extensively with it, but it has some compatibility problems with vector tiles and other small issues when dragging vector tiles for example. Is Maplibre the gold standard for vector tiles now?

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#149

Post by tecleandor »

hyperknot wrote: post #111
bdon wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, there are tradeoffs to using static storage - the intended audience for PMTiles is those that prefer using static sites instead of administering a Linux server. I would be interested to see a comparison of Btrfs + nginx serving latency, vs `pmtiles serve` from https://github.com/protomaps/go-pmtiles on a PMTiles archive on disk. That would be a more direct comparison. I think there's potentially some interes…

I think both solutions could easily saturate a 1 Gbps line. I benchmarked Btrfs + nginx and it could do 30 Gbps, which doesn't really make a difference if your server is 1 Gbps only. The fact that there is no service running was the more important for me. Mostly for security and bugs. I had so many problems with various tile servers in production, they needed daily restarting, they had memory leaks, etc. Basically I…

You both specify the filesystem to be Btrfs. Is there any advantage in this case against ZFS, ext4, XFS... or is it just a practical choice?

Re: Show HN: OpenFreeMap – Open-Source Map Hosting

#150

Post by ryantgtg »

Neat!

We used to host our own mbtiles map for like $11/mo, but the problem was (this was prior to planetiler and people generating public worldwide mbtile dumps) there wasn't a free/cheap source for regularly-updated mbtiles. The dump from OpenMapTiles was not updated for years.

So we gave up and went to mapbox, where we regularly exceed the monthly free tier for web, but they give us a discount. Because that is a scary scenario and we are dying to pay a fixed monthly fee, I think we will try yours and donate!

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